This episode explores the rhetorical strategies of Revolutionary writer Thomas Paine in his explosive pamphlet series The Crisis and Common Sense. We draw connections between the growing emphasis on the individual in the wake of the Protestant Reformation and the secular emergence of "reason" as a natural extension of this in the Enlightenment. Paine, along with Thomas Jefferson, draws on these ideals of individual reason and liberty to justify (and animate) the American Revolution. His texts carefully employ a rhetoric of "common sense" to present opinions that any "reasonable" audience might find hard to disagree with. This is why, I'll suggest, we have to be particularly careful as readers not to get swept up in this rhetoric or take things at face value: we always must keep in mind the complexity (and compromises) of this fascinating historical period.